The Shapeshifters: A Novel

by Stefan Spjut

  But what was it a reminder of?

  That everyone could be a monster?

  The chair creaked as Susso leaned back in her seat. There was nothing new. The monitor showed an amarok: a wolf- or bear-like monster in Greenland that liked to eat the Inuit’s children but could never catch them. Pretty much the same as the stallo.

  In Sami folklore the stallo were a kind of troll. They were huge, terrible creatures depicted by the nåjden, or shaman, on his drum. Troublesome and stupid. Fond of human flesh.

  She had written about them on her website, mainly because these creatures oscillated between myth and scientific knowledge in a way that interested her. In fact, many archaeologists were convinced there was some kind of underlying truth to the myths of the stallo. Ancient settlements and trapping pits that could not be linked to the nomadic Sami culture had been excavated in various places in northern Scandinavia.

  The question was: what had happened to these mysterious creatures?

  The road to Ammarnäs was unlit. There was only the glimmer of light from an occasional house, lamps deeply embedded in the darkness. But the curves of the road were imprinted in Seved’s brain and he knew the places where snowdrifts could block the way.

  During his school years the road had left its mark on him. The days began and ended with the road then, days when he set off in darkness and returned home in darkness. There had been daylight as well, but when he thought of that time it was only the molten, insatiable darkness he remembered. The night outside the windowpanes, the rough upholstery of the seats illuminated by the lights in the ceiling of the bus, the handrails reflected in the vibrating glass. His own taciturn face and growing hunger. He and the driver, alone, kilometre after kilometre. The long walk from the main road towards the glow of the lights on the veranda that seemed to be moving ever further away. And then his greed at the kitchen table, his only comfort.

  The lemmingshifters had not made a sound and he had almost forgotten about them. He had been thinking of the money in his jacket pocket since he left Arvidsjaur. Fifty thousand would not go far. Not even a hundred and fifty went far.

  But still. To have money that was all his own.

  He knew Lennart was wealthy. He had seen the fat, untidy wads of notes that Börje and Ejvor accepted from him, and once when he had been shopping at the Co-op he had asked the girl at the till how much was left on the pre-loaded card. There was over a hundred thousand, and he could see from the girl’s face that it was a lot, that people did not normally have sums of that size on their cards.

  He pressed his hand to his jacket and felt the notes. They were there, like a compact slab against his chest. He had still not decided whether to tell Börje he had been given the money.

  Did Börje know what Lennart had wanted to talk to him about?

  In all probability, he did. But did he care? At the moment he didn’t seem to care about anything. That was not so strange. Letting Ejvor remain where she was must have been unbearable for him. Not being able to do anything except wait.

  Signe had said that Börje had peered through the window several times, standing there with his hands on the windowsill. It was understandable that he wanted to see her, and perhaps even necessary, but why put yourself through it over and over again? Why torture yourself?

  Seved could not understand why they had gone for Ejvor in particular. At first he thought it must have happened by mistake, that they just hadn’t realised how strong they were. He had experienced that for himself once when he had been inside Hybblet, cleaning up. They had come upstairs, which wasn’t something they normally did. Usually they would just shuffle about, sometimes barging into him, but on this occasion they decided they wanted to hug him. Seved had probably tensed his muscles too much because suddenly it turned into a battle of strength. He had passed out. First there was an explosion like fireworks going off, and then everything had gone black. When he came round they were running up and down the staircase, making it creak and groan, and Ejvor had said that was probably an expression of their remorse, to the extent they had those sorts of feelings. Seved was left with purple streaks across his chest, and Börje said he had probably cracked a couple of ribs but not to worry, they would heal on their own, and they did.

  Don’t fret, Ejvor had said, they wouldn’t harm a hair on your head.

  Soon he reached the curve where it had happened. It was many years ago now and he had been in the eighth or ninth grade. One Saturday he had gone to a party in a large house in Sorsele. It stood on the edge of the lake and was brightly lit up in the night. Doors and windows were open. There was shouting, a racket, and no parents to put a stop to it. The girl had just moved to the area. It was September and the school term had not long started.

  He drove there on his moped. One lad from his class had brought a plastic bottle containing something cloudy. A witch’s brew. It tasted revolting but it did the trick. He wanted more. He had searched the bathroom and found a bottle of perfume, and in front of a small audience, watching him with eyes blurry from alcohol, he downed the lot. They thought he was insane, but in a cool way.

  Later he got his hands on a girl he did not know. She had a Norwegian name and he could not for the life of him remember it afterwards. She was the one who had hit on him. All he had to do was turn his cap round and take what was offered. They snogged on a sofa. He probed hard with his fingers but didn’t get anywhere, although he had been close. He slipped out his dick and wanted her to hold it, but she pulled her hand away rapidly, as if she had touched a snake.

  Someone had seen it and they did not like what they saw. Either that or they did not like him. As he was driving home afterwards in the grey dawn light, a car swung in front of him, its wheels screeching. A Volvo 740 with alloy wheels and music thumping from its loudspeakers. He had no time to stop his moped, so he ran into the car. That in itself was a good enough reason for a beating.

  Two of them climbed out. Red cheeks, loud voices, caps. Thick neck chains outside their jumpers. They shoved his shoulders, but he was too drunk to fend them off. All he could do was try to avoid them. Get away. Home was not far away, only a few kilometres. And he remembered saying that. ‘I’m almost home,’ he had said, grabbing the handlebars, trying to roll the moped out of the way.

  As if being close to home had anything to do with it.

  As if that would make them leave him alone.

  But in a way it did.

  The next day, the newspaper said they had flipped the car over, made it do somersaults.

  Three teenage boys killed on the 363.

  The school had held a minute’s silence. Seved did not attend because he got the idea someone had seen what had actually happened, that there were witnesses, and so he had phoned in sick. But he heard about it later. How the principal had spoken solemnly to the assembled students about the dangers of driving while drunk.

  ‘Now you see how wrong things can go,’ he had said.

  Oh yes, he had seen all right. He had kneeled at the roadside and seen it all: the lads who had got out of the car to attack him had all of a sudden been grabbed, turned upside down and had their heads slammed bloodily against the surface of the road. Their bodies had flown in deep among the fir trees, to be met by snapping branches.

  The car had been lifted up and dangled in the air. He saw the amusement of the old-timers as the car spun like a tombola drum between them. The piercing cries and shouts for help from inside the car seemed to fire them up, fill them with a crazy energy and make the car revolve faster and faster. The pumping music was distorted as the car turned and it did not fall silent until the vehicle lay crushed on its roof five metres into the forest.

  Afterwards they had wanted to carry him home, and he did not dare refuse. They wanted to take turns carrying him too. One held him and one held the moped. Then they swapped. And swapped again.

  He had never said a word to anyone about what happened that night. But he thought Börje knew because the following morning he had stared at Sev
ed and said something about him being lucky. Lucky he was not the one who had killed himself driving.

  The road up to the house ran behind a mountain. Unless you knew the drive was there it was almost impossible to see. Several times he had driven past it himself and had to turn back. The mountain was asymmetrical: the southern slope that faced the river had slipped. The precipice that remained was a hanging rock face, and when the meltwater froze, long yellow icicles formed up there in its jaws. From the road below they looked like fangs. When Seved was young and looked up at the mountain he always thought of it as a gaping mouth that could bite.

  He stopped at the barrier and hurried out to open it. He grabbed hold of the padlock with most of his hand tucked inside his jacket sleeve and inserted the little key. It trembled between his fingers, which were red in the light from the Isuzu’s headlamps. When he got back in the car again he blew on his hands. They were stinging.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he said, and it wasn’t until he heard the reassuring tone of his voice that he realised the shifters had got to him. They had gone inside his head to tell him they were cold.

  With her hat pulled down over her forehead, Susso walked home through the darkness. The temperature had dropped even lower overnight: ice blocked her nostrils as she cut across Kyrkparken.

  Curiously, she felt a muffled buzzing in her jacket pocket. Who could be phoning this early in the day? She pulled off one mitten and it took a while before she was able to get her mobile out. 0971 shone from the display. Jokkmokk, she registered, before realising it could be none other than Edit Mickelsson who was ringing.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve woken you up, haven’t I?’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ Susso said. ‘I’ve been working a night shift.’

  The cold was pinching her fingers. She cradled the phone against her cheek, keeping it there as she put her mitten back on.

  ‘He . . . he’s been here again. The man I saw.’

  Susso came to a halt and caught her breath.

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘I woke up,’ she said, and then her voice disappeared for a second or two before she cleared her throat and continued: ‘I was woken by a knocking on the window, the kitchen window. And when I got up to see what was going on, there he was, outside. He was standing there, looking in. Just like last time. Except this time it was dark. I could hardly see him at first.’

  ‘The camera,’ said Susso, starting to walk quickly. ‘Have you checked it?’

  ‘No,’ answered Edit. ‘I don’t really know how to. And I’m a bit scared to go outside, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘But you’re absolutely sure?’

  ‘As sure as I can be.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘I went and got Edvin’s rifle. And when he saw it, he dropped down. Perhaps that was a stupid thing to do. Because I’d really like to know what he wants.’

  ‘Yes. Me too.’

  Susso knew it would be nothing short of suicidal to drive as far as Jokkmokk after working a night shift, but she convinced herself she had no choice. With any luck they had captured the person on camera.

  She could not gather her thoughts, she was far too tired for that. All she could do was walk as fast as possible. She let herself quietly into Gudrun’s hall and snatched the car keys. Then she went down to her own flat to get ready. In the bathroom she let out a yell and, in a desperate attempt to relieve the pain, smacked the palm of her hand hard against the tiles, obscenities pouring from her mouth: she had put in a contact lens using fingers that had been in contact with the powdered tobacco in her snus tin. The stinging in her eye and the fury at bringing it on herself in such an idiotic way—she didn’t know which came first—had the effect of waking her up. Her cheeks grew hot. She extracted the lens, crumpled it up and washed out her eye, groaning into the handbasin. Then she raked about in the cabinet until she found her glasses.

  From her wardrobe she pulled out the military-green backpack that she had borrowed from Torbjörn. After putting on her boots and jacket she thundered down the stairs to the dark, cold garage where the car was standing, a grey Passat. She threw the backpack onto the rear seat of her mother’s car, moved the driver’s seat forwards and reversed out. A couple of times in the past she had scraped the left wing mirror on a concrete post, so she drove especially slowly up and out through the garage exit.

  There was another car parked outside Edit Mickelsson’s house when Susso pulled up and a wave of reluctance washed through Susso’s stomach when she saw it. Her first instinct was to do a U-turn. Make a curved track in the snow and drive home again. But she knew that she could never do that, so instead she pushed the snus pouch as far up inside her mouth as she could with the tip of her tongue and parked at an angle behind Edit’s car.

  Behind the cafe-style curtains she glimpsed a sudden movement. There was a ringing in her head, but now she had woken up, found her second wind. She decided to leave the backpack where it was on the back seat. Why she had brought it with her she had no idea. If Edit was not alone in there, it was probably advisable to go in empty-handed and a little bewildered.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, Edit and a thin man in a padded vest and cap. The peak hid his face; only his chin and pinched mouth were visible. In the indentation below his lower lip he had a little goatee tuft sprinkled with grey. The man could be none other than Edit’s son, Per-Erik.

  Edit looked over her shoulder and her lips formed a swift smile. Was she looking rather ashamed? Susso had not said she was coming, not definitely. She realised that now. She had said she might come, and now suddenly it seemed as if she was intruding. She wondered what to say, but the situation resolved itself when she caught sight of the wildlife camera on the worktop. There was no mistaking the fact that it was broken: only shards of the diodes remained. The plastic cover had been cracked open and the electronics were visible through the gap.

  ‘What’s happened here?’ she said, walking over to the worktop.

  Both Edit and her son watched her. The man had laid one hand over the other and was stroking his chapped knuckles. It looked as if he was contemplating something. Just as Susso thought he was going to open his mouth he turned away and peered out through the window instead, but there was nothing to see there.

  The camera could never be repaired. It was not only broken—someone had destroyed it. Susso levered the plastic halves open as far as they would go, unwilling but curious to know what the contents looked like.

  ‘It broke,’ he said finally. ‘When I got it down.’

  There was a momentary delay before the fury rose up inside Susso, but she controlled herself. She poked her index finger into her mouth and hooked out the snus pouch, which she threw away in the rubbish bin under the sink. After she had slammed the cupboard door shut she folded her arms and studied Per-Erik’s face in profile. She had detected a small grin, but he was now concealing it under a false expression of innocence.

  ‘Typical,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, you have to have permission,’ he added.

  Susso shook her head. All she could do was smile.

  ‘There are laws,’ he said, gripping the peak of his cap and nodding in his mother’s direction. As he righted his cap the dark wisps of hair at his temples shifted.

  ‘We’ll pay you for the camera, of course,’ said Edit.

  ‘Like hell we will!’

  Per-Erik leaned across the table and stared into his mother’s eyes.

  ‘Anyone putting up a camera does so at their own risk. That’s what the law says.’

  As he said ‘the law’ he tapped his snus tin on the tabletop.

  ‘Is that what the law says?’ Susso asked. She grinned at him. Was he being serious?

  Per-Erik shrugged, clicked open the tin and probed with his fingers.

  ‘Well, that’s just the way it is,’ he said.

  Susso bowed her head, examining the rug on the floor. He was goading her. Not without success, she was force
d to admit. But she kept quiet because it was risky to continue.

  There was no more to say. They had reached deadlock, and for a long time it was silent in the kitchen. Per-Erik had opened the snus tin and taken out a pouch without taking his eyes off his mother, who was looking down at the tablecloth. He pressed the snus into his mouth, rubbed his large, rough hands together and shifted his heavy boots underneath the table. Then he stood up and muttered something Susso could not hear. He thrust out his head and stomped to the door. A small reindeer-horn knife dangled from his belt.

  Then there was rumbling outside the house. Per-Erik’s engine increased to a roar before he backed the car out of the driveway, causing snow to fly up from the tyres.

  Susso sank down on one of the kitchen chairs. She pushed a finger under one lens of her glasses and rubbed her eyelid, releasing a long sigh. The memory card looked a bit bent, and that looked ominous, but probably the worst thing was that the camera had been trampled in the snow. She had no idea how sensitive the circuit boards were to damp.

  Edit stood by the coffee machine holding an unbleached coffee filter. She had folded it and was busy pinching the fold as she watched Susso. The old woman looked genuinely sorry.

  ‘Have you got a camera that can read this?’ asked Susso, lifting up the tiny plastic card.

  ‘Camera? No, not one like that. Not a digital one.’

  ‘And you haven’t got a reader, for your computer?’

  Edit looked around, trying to remember where the computer could be.

  ‘You’ve got to have a special memory card reader,’ Susso said. ‘You know, one of those little external gadgets.’

  Using her fingertips she indicated the size of a matchbox on the tabletop.

  ‘Have you?’ said Edit. ‘No, I haven’t got one of those. Sorry.’